The invention generally relates computer systems and computer executed methods of optimization of yield for advertising inventory.
Direct mail, newspaper, and television are slowly becoming the past for companies to build their brand name, public image, and to bring awareness to their new products. By contrast, the online advertising market has accelerated in recent years. One of the most significant contributors to the online advertising market is the rapid influx of ad networks. As the amount of websites grow online and people using those websites increases, more ad networks are expected to emerge to serve as brokers for advertisers. Today, the online advertising market is an ever-expanding market fragmented by ad spending that has spread among 300+ disparate advertising networks worldwide including Google's AdSense, Yahoo!'s Publisher Network, HispanoClick, and Adtegrity.
Currently, ad networks allow website publishers to generate revenue by placing advertisements from the ad networks on their webpages. In many web applications and on many websites, advertisements are presented in the form of banners, graphic squares, text advertisements, video advertisements, pop-up and pop-under advertisements, Flash or other animated advertisements that move across the screen, etc., and displayed prominently on a web display, referred to as a “webpage.” Users attracted to an advertisement often “click” on the advertisement by positioning a screen cursor on the advertisement and then depressing a button on a mouse or other input device. By clicking on the advertisement, a “hyperlink” to another website, associated with the advertisement and usually the home site of the advertiser, generates a path to the advertiser's designated page. Typically, the name of the path is presented to the user in the form of a uniform resource locator (“URL”), such as “ABC—Inc.com,” followed by a directory path designating the particular page in the site that the advertiser wishes to be displayed, such as “/directory 13 name/page—name.”
One question still remains, i.e., how to intelligently optimize yield for advertising inventory delivered by a publisher server based on third party demand.